Clam in a Bottle: Cultivating Multispecies Climate Resiliency through Deep Contact

• In Event: Animals from a Sociological Perspective Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 3: Human-Animal Futures

Abstract

The social sciences recognize that humans live in multispecies worlds, but yet studies of climate resiliency rarely consider nonhumans in understandings of resiliency. This paper asks: how are nonhumans incorporated into climate resiliency? Advancing actor network theories of ‘translation’ and multispecies ethnography theories of ‘attentiveness’ I develop a framework of deep contact, regarding how humans read nonhumans for shared projects, like cultivating climate resiliency. Drawing from two years of ethnography and fifty-one interviews, this paper investigates Maine’s climate-driven transition from wild-caught to farmed shellfisheries. This transition reconfigures multispecies relationships: fishermen now cultivate shellfish in marine farms that protect from climate stressors and mobilize these relations to address shared environmental challenges, like water quality deterioration. This paper thus offers a twofold argument: climate resiliency is a multispecies achievement, necessitating multispecies coordination; for multispecies relations to be resilient, humans must align behavior with nonhuman needs and capacities - an interactional process of deep contact attentiveness that this paper theorizes. These findings challenge anthropocentric biases underpinning theories of resiliency and social interaction, instead centering multispecies and ecocentric models of resiliency. This paper thus reframes climate resilience as a multispecies achievement, which depends not on mastering nature, but on learning to translate and align with it.

Author

• Abby Westberry, New York University